One of the biggest challenges for me as a blogger is blogging about an event or holiday. I don't have the time (or the money) to make and photograph dishes before the occasion, so normally I am not posting ideas and recipes until after the actual event. I promise I will work on it, but until I overcome this blogging dilemma, here is a look at how we spent Super Sunday.
The tagline for this blog talks about how food can bring family and friends together and a big part of how I do that is making a food event anytime I can, and what food event is bigger than the Super Bowl? Pound for pound more food is made on Super Sunday than any other day, including Thanksgiving! Many of you have either chosen to attend Super Bowl parties or to host them, but you don't need a crowd to enjoy the fun that accompanies this bit of Americana.
When our children were young, we were such a crowd, and getting a sitter was so expensive, that we started making the Super Bowl a family affair and that tradition has carried through to this day. That doesn't mean we don't ever invite people, it just means the most important MVPs at our house are family. I decorate with the colors of the opposing teams, print out pictures and logos to make our table festive, and we usually each make our predictions with a prize for the person who gets closest to the actual final score (You can see that my husband won the DVD What About Bob?, this years prize since he was the only one who thought the Giants would win!)Not everyone in our family is a football fan , but they are all fans of football food, and so everyone gets into the action. As the kids have grown up, they often contribute their own recipes or want to make a dish for the Super Bowl table.
This year, even though neither the Redskins (#1 favorite Dowd team) nor the Packers (#2 Dowd favorite team) were in the Super Bowl, we stared getting wound up last weekend- the underdog Giants vs. the perfect season Patriots offered us lots to talk about. Some Dowds jumped on the Tom Brady perfect-season bandwagon, while some of the women wanted all kinds of harm to come to Tom Brady because of his abandonment of his pregnant girlfriend (told you even non-football fans could get drawn in!), and so they were rooting for the Giants in a big way. I was sitting on the fence until I found out that a young man who works at JLab's Copy Center is the cousin of Giants #27, and so of course, that was enough of a local connection (and the whole underdog thing) to push me off the fence.
While the game is important, in our house it is all about the food, and I started working on the menu several days before the weekend. I tried to have a variety of healthy and traditional "football" foods so that we are not just filling up on chips and dip. So what was on the Dowd Super Bowl Menu? It was an all-star line-up of old favorites and new dishes.
Crudites with hummus dip
Chili-cheese cups- an easy family favorite made by pressing canned biscuits into muffin tins, filling with a mixture of your favorite chili with grated cheese and baking till the crust is brown and the cheese is bubbly.
Elise's 7-layer dip from Simply Recipes - This was a great and healthier version of an old favorite, and everyone liked it better than the original!
Fricken' Chicken (posted previously)
Apple-Red Onion-Blue Cheese Slaw (a new recipe that Bridget made) - She tried to recreate a slaw they made at the restaurant where she works, with matchstick strips of red onion and granny smith apples, crumbled blue cheese and tossed with a little salt and white wine vinegar- it was a perfect foil for some smoking hot wings she made and my frickin' chicken!
Baby Potatoes with Light Sour Cream and Caviar (pictured here at the Giants end of the football table!)A new feature for this Super Bowl was my daughter's suggestion that we put a cup on the table and anyone who said a curse word would have to put a quarter in, assuming that her dad would have to open a roll of quarters (he has been known to yell obscenities at the TV during a game). However, I turned out to be the #1 offender with $1.50 in the cup!! Katie, who usually doesn't even watch football, was in for $1.00! We are thinking of instituting this next football season to boost our vacation fund (the way the Redskins play, we could probably go to Hawaii!!!)
We had great food, watched a great game and as a bonus, our team won!! And you know what? I will post these recipes in advance of next year's Super Bowl so you can gve them a try, too.
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